Spotlight

​An entertaining novel for young people and adults alike!

Space travel, mystery, and a family feud....

Benji Haight comes from a gifted family. His parents intuitively know things, and his sister Lisa can sometimes read minds. Benji doesn’t seem to have a gift. But when he discovers an ancient well near their new home, he finds it is a portal to the universe that only he can access. As Benji and Lisa begin to explore, they make friends across the galaxy. They also uncover a family mystery: Are they related to a boy that used the portal a century earlier? Was the boy’s death an accident, or the result of a family feud as old as the town they live in? As the centuries-old feud threatens tragedy once again, Benji and Lisa turn to their parents for help, and exploration becomes a family adventure.

Excerpt

Further around the pond, Benji noticed what looked like a circle of rocks a few yards from the water. He went to look at it and discovered that inside the rocks was a hole, and that the hole was filled to the brim with water.

“A well?” he wondered. Why would anyone dig a well so close to a pond, where there was already water?

He leaned over the rocks and looked into the well. The water was clear.

“I’d sure rather drink that water then the green pond water,” he decided. “No wonder they dug a well here.”

If there was a fireplace and a well, Benji thought, maybe there had once been a house here. And if there had once been a house here, maybe there would be interesting things to find, like that bottle.

Benji was about to turn away in search of ancient artifacts when something in the well caught his eye. He stared at the water. He thought he could see a twinkling deep down in the depths. He glanced at the sky, wondering if he might be seeing a reflection. Then he stared at the water again. As he watched, the twinkle came up through the water toward him. Then he saw another, and then several more.

“They look like stars,” he thought. “But what are they doing in a well, and why are they moving?”

The lights seemed to multiply, until there were thousands of them. As they came toward the surface, Benji could see the twinkling lights growing. They swirled, and began to look like a spiral.

“I’ve seen that somewhere before,” Benji thought. “It looks like pictures I’ve seen of the Milky Way.”

But the pictures Benji had seen had been flat. Two-dimensional, that was the word for them. What he saw now was deep, like a well full of stars. And as he watched, the stars began to come up through the surface of the water and swirl right in front of him. They didn’t create any kind of breeze, like a fan would, and yet he could almost feel their motion. They were tiny, and yet he could feel them pulling at him, like gravity or magnetism.

He put his hand out closer to the stars swirling before him. It felt like they might pull his hand in, like a giant vacuum cleaner!

“This is too weird,” he said. He took three steps backward. Then, as he watched, the stars began to sink into the well from which they had come.

​Benji stared for almost five minutes, until the stars were long gone. Then, he turned and ran as fast as he could back the way he had come.

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